The Man With the Child in His Eyes

The year was 1980; the place a tiny Harvard dorm room. I was a naive young man from the mountains of rural, southwestern Virginia, and my first boyfriend was introducing me to sex, to love, and to the music of Kate Bush, a name I'd never heard, and a voice like none I'd ever heard. And this song... oh, this song was expressing something about my life, my coming-out process, my opening up to another man, feelings and actions I'd withheld to then, and all the attendant doubts and fears of finally releasing them. I barely think back to my college years now, or even have many strong memories of that time, but this song and a few others — like Bronski Beat's "Smalltown Boy" and Quarterflash's "Love Should Be So Kind "— take me right back to that place and time, and let me again be that green kid with so much yet to learn, feel, do, be.

Written by a young Kate Bush (sources vary, but Kate herself is quoted as saying that she wrote and first recorded the song at age 16). The lyrics tell of a relationship between a young girl and an older man — perhaps an imagined relationship, as no one but the girl is certain that the man truly exists. The phrase "child in his eyes" comes from Kate's observation that most of the men she knew at that time of her life were "little boys inside," that they are "more or less just grown up kids."

This was one of the first songs Kate ever recorded, having done so three years before the release of The Kick Inside, her debut album. On December 9, 1978, Kate performed this song (along with "Them Heavy People") on Saturday Night Live, her first U.S. performance.

I hear him, before I go to sleep
And focus on the day that's been.
I realise he's there,
When I turn the light off and turn over.

Nobody knows about my man.
They think he's lost on some horizon.
And suddenly I find myself
Listening to a man I've never known before,